Aceh military operation and the nationalist crisis

Teuku Faizasyah, Ph.D.Candidate on Diplomatic History and Conflict Resolution, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

A concerted effort to restore order to Aceh, including the launch of a military operation to uproot the separatist group, is in progress. Resorting to the military option has been regarded as essential because, as it is often proclaimed, the unity and survival of the Republic of Indonesia is at stake. Therefore, a victory on the battlefield is a must.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer echoed this same sentiment when he cautioned Australians of the possible negative impact of regional instability if Indonesian forces failed to fulfill their mission in Aceh.

The war in Aceh is portrayed as a contest between nationalism and unity against disarray or disunity. Therefore, Indonesians from all walks of life are expected to accept and support the war campaign. Our journalists are repeatedly asked to behave nationalistically and be "responsible journalists".

When emotions run high, speaking out against a popular held belief risks that person of being labeled unpatriotic, or worse, being suspected as pro-Free Aceh Movement (GAM). This whole affair of a "perception setting" raises the question of whether this rigid standpoint has any merit.

Is it fair to judge our nationalism from how we perceive the war? What about our moral conscience: Can't we openly express our sympathy of civilians' suffering and without being branded an enemy of the state?

In fact, the level of our nationalism should be assessed from our ability to empathize with the suffering of innocent civilians in various parts of Aceh. Those civilians are no longer able to live in peace or have peace of mind. It is somewhat ironic that many of us can sleep peacefully at night while some of our fellow countrymen are unable to close their eyes out of fear that they may not see the sun rise the next morning or have enough food to survive.

At the same time, the agony of war is felt not only by the Acehnese in Aceh, but also by those who reside in other parts of Indonesia, and even overseas. If those trapped in the conflict zone experience physical or mental agony, the Acehnese living outside the area are in mental anguish, especially if public opinion is geared toward questioning their nationalism.

As if they are living in an Orwellian world, those Acehnese have to behave and speak with caution because Big Brother is watching them at all times.

In Indonesia's case, nationalism is often used as a rallying point at times of crisis, such as during the war for independence in the mid-1940s. In the late 1990s, when our currency collapsed, the Soeharto government asked Indonesians to convert their dollars to rupiah, supposedly as a show of nationalism.

We cannot claim that the Aceh conflict is an isolated case of a weakening in the cohesion of today's Indonesia. Arguably, that conflict is only the tip of the iceberg in our growing problem of eroding nationalism. Nowadays, we are beset by a greater tendency for divisive forces, provincialism and prioritizing the interests of groups or political parties by putting them before national interests.

Some resource-rich areas in Indonesia appear reluctant to share their wealth with people of different ethnicities. Some migrants who have cultivated land for a lengthy period of time have even been expelled from their promised land.

Meanwhile, there are greater demands to reserve some strategic positions only for natives (putra daerah). Also alarming is that in some areas there are growing interests to reinvoke the old sultanate system as a means of strengthening local identity.

It is somewhat ironic that when we are promoting a freer movement of skilled and semiskilled workers in Southeast Asia and globally, we are having difficulty managing some of the barriers erected against our fellow countrymen at the domestic level. Certainly, a quest for ethnic identity is a part of human nature, but secluding other ethnic groups based on provincialism has interrupted the fair game of equal opportunity in a pluralist society such as Indonesia's.

Divisive forces and centrifugal dynamics are a challenge for all of us. At issue here is how to deal with these developments wisely. Perhaps we need to reinvent our nationalism and the first step is by showing our sympathy and solidarity to those fellow citizens suffering in conflict areas and those who have been internally displaced after they were expelled from their promised land.

In 1928, when our founding fathers made a youthful pledge to keep Indonesia as one nation, what bound them together was their sense of solidarity. However, back then it was the solidarity of the oppressed. In the reform and democratic era -- supposedly free from oppression -- we should be able to develop solidarity from our conscience.

The second step is to avoid a narrow interpretation of nationalism. The outcome of narrow interpretation is fanaticism and the inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and reality and illusion.

Therefore, we should not measure nationalism by physical appearance. We need to ponder whether damaging an office of a non-governmental organization (NGO) -- perceived as critical to the military -- was a reflection of nationalism and a patriotic act or simply blind fanaticism.

The third step is to dig deep and search for the root of the cause of the various conflicts and national problems. For instance, do problems in Aceh and Papua simply concern their interests which, in theory, are negotiable, or do they concern values that require a deeper analysis of the underlying factors in order to resolve them.

Our success in reinventing our sense of nationalism and ability to see the wisdom of our forefathers' pledge for having one nation will hopefully make each of us a proud but sensible nationalist. Indonesians unified by solidarity and consciousness would free us from political scientist Karl Deutsch's rather cynical definition of a nation: "a group of persons united by common errors about their ancestry and common dislike of their neighbors".